Auditory Seasoning Filters: Altering Food Perception via Augmented Sonic Feedback of Chewing Sounds

The experience of what we eat depends not only on the taste of the food, but also on other modalities of sensory feedback. Perceptual research has shown the potential of altering visual, olfactory, and textural food cues to affect flavor, texture, and satiety. Recently, the HCI community has leveraged such research to encourage healthy eating, but the resulting tools often require specialised and/or invasive devices. Ubiquitous and unobtrusive, audio feedback-based tools could alleviate those drawbacks, but research in this area has been limited to food texture. We expand on prior psychology research by exploring a wide range of auditory feedback styles to modify not only flavor attributes but also appetite-related measures. We present Auditory Seasoning, a mobile app that offers various curated audio modes to alter chewing sounds. In a Pringles-tasting experiment (N=37), this tool significantly influenced food perception and eating behavior beyond texture alone. Based on these results, we discuss design implications to create custom real-world flavor/satiety-enhancing tools.